26 Midstream Companies and Their Stock Symbols

Much like their upstream counterparts, midstream companies have shifted to fiscal conservatism over the past few years, focusing less on growth and capital investment and more on shareholder returns, acquisitions and debt reduction. But there are significant differences between the strategies of midstream companies set up as traditional corporations, or C-corps, and those established as master limited partnerships, or MLPs. In today’s RBN blog, we continue our short series on midstream company cash flow allocation with an analysis of their reinvestment rates vs. their shareholder payouts. 

Much the way that COVID-19 accelerated the trends toward working from anywhere, shopping online, and exercising at home, the pandemic and its far-reaching energy-market effects fast-forwarded the challenges that many North American midstream companies had been expecting to face more gradually through the 2020s. The good news — if you can call it that — is that a lot of economic pain was front-loaded into the past 10 months. The bad news is that a sizable subset of midstreamers is saddled with too much capacity in shale basins where drilling activity and production are down sharply. For them, there’s still more pain ahead, even bankruptcy in a few cases. In today’s blog, we discuss highlights from the newly released 2021 edition of East Daley Capital’s Dirty Little Secrets report about what’s ahead for the midstream sector and 27 leading companies within it.

The prolific, liquids-rich Permian Basin and Eagle Ford plays have attracted more than a dozen midstream companies interested in meeting the growing need for natural gas processing plants, fractionators and natural gas liquids pipelines. Some of the larger players have assembled broad-based portfolios of assets, while others have focused on more stand-alone NGL pipeline or gas processing investments. Today we begin wrapping up our series on NGL-related assets in two of the nation’s most important shale plays.